Accounting for change.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: Miller, Turner Seek Reform After Enron - Paul B.W. Miller; Lynn Turner

Paul B.W. Miller, an accounting professor, first met Lynn Turner, an accounting professional, in the late 1970s when Turner worked at the local office of Coopers & Lybrand in Salt Lake City and Miller taught economics at the University of Utah. Their careers recently crossed again, but this time with Colorado's Front Range as the backdrop, and the nation's financial and investment community as their stage.

BOTH TURNER AND MILLER ARE EXPERTS IN FINANCIAL reporting, the quarterly dollar-by-dollar disclosure of financial performance by U.S companies whose stocks are traded publicly. The 2001 bankruptcy of Enron Corp., and the subsequent criminal indictment of Enron's Big Five auditing firm Arthur Andersen, has caused each to emerge as a leading proponent of post-Enron accounting reform. And while their goals for reform are similar, each embraces decidedly different means to that end: Turner wants to reform the system; Miller wants to reform people's minds.

WHO'S WHO

A native of Longmont and an alumnus of Colorado State University, Lynn Turner is a certified public accountant who has spent much of his career in the corporate sector. After a stint advising Congress while "on loan" from Coopers, he won a prized fellowship from the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1989 and worked in the office of the agency's chief accountant, the SEC's top policy adviser.

He returned to the corporate world in 1991, working for Coopers in its Denver office (to clean up the Enron-esque "turmoil" of Miniscribe, a Coopers auditing client found to be packing bricks in boxes thought to contain its computer inventory) and then as CEO for Fort Collins-based Symbios Inc.

In 1998, then-SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt Jr. asked Turner to become the agency's chief accountant, a post he knew could be used as a catalyst for accounting reform. He commuted from Colorado to Washington D.C. as chief accountant until last August, then returned to his alma mater to teach and establish the new Center for Quality Financial Reporting, which he hopes to develop into a world-class academic hub for the accounting world.

But before Turner can make that vision of the center a reality, he has to get beyond the wake of Enron.

"This isn't just Enron, and it isn't just Andersen," Turner said. "This problem has been brewing for a long time. We've got a litany, a parade of massive financial frauds over the last three, four years -- like we've never had in this country before."

TEXAS ACADEMIC

A career academic and a Texan by birth, the tall, gregarious Paul B.W. Miller is a CPA with a doctorate who spent the bulk of the 1970s at the University of Utah. He served a 15-month...